Crime at Bedtime

On a warm Friday morning in April 2005, Ray Gricar, the sitting District Attorney of Centre County, Pennsylvania, walked out of his office in Bellefonte, got into his red Mini Cooper, and drove east on Route 192 towards the town of Lewisburg. He was 59 years old. He was eight months from retirement. He had spent 20 years as one of the most respected prosecutors in central Pennsylvania. At 11:30 that morning, he called his partner from a rural stretch of road, told her he would not be home in time to walk the dog, and hung up. He was never seen again. The next day, his car was found in a Lewisburg parking lot with cigarette ashes inside from a man who did not smoke. His work laptop was later pulled from the Susquehanna River with its hard drive removed. His home computer had recent searches for "how to wreck a hard drive." Three national investigations have never resolved what happened. Twenty-one years later, no one knows whether Ray Gricar took his own life, staged his own disappearance, or was murdered by someone connected to the criminals he had prosecuted.
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On the morning of the 7th of June 1992, a 19-year-old woman named Janelle Kirby drove across Springfield, Missouri, to a small house on East Delmar Street, looking for her two best friends. They had graduated from high school the day before. They were supposed to be driving down to a resort in Branson. When Janelle pushed open the unlocked front door, she found the family's terrier agitated, the girls' clothes folded neatly on chairs, beds slept in, purses untouched, cars in the driveway, and the smashed pieces of the porch light scattered across the boards outside. What she did not find was Suzie Streeter, her mother Sherrill Levitt, or her friend Stacy McCall. Three women had vanished from inside that house overnight. The dog. The beds. The car. The purses. The cash. All of it left behind. Thirty-four years later, no one has ever solved one of the strangest unsolved disappearances in the history of the American Midwest.
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On a winter night in 1961, in a stone bunker on a hilltop outside Turin, two young Italian brothers sat in front of a wall of homemade radio equipment and heard something they would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain. The slow, wet sound of a man breathing his last breaths from somewhere above the Earth. Over the following years, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia would record eight more transmissions just like it. Morse code SOS signals from spacecraft in trouble. A capsule drifting into deep space. A female voice, calm at first and then terrified, counting down numbers in Russian as her capsule appeared to burn up around her. They were the dying breaths of Soviet cosmonauts on missions that, officially, never happened. Or they were one of the most extraordinary fabrications of the Cold War. Sixty years on, no one has been able to decide which.
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At just past three in the morning on the 19th of November 1986, a snowplough driver named Joseph Hine was driving along the edge of Lake Zoar in rural Connecticut when he saw something that did not belong. A rented truck. A woodchipper attached to the back. And a man standing beside it, operating the machine, in the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of the night. Hine kept driving. He had a job to do. Five weeks later, when Connecticut State Police searched a house just a few miles from where Hine had been working that night, he would remember exactly what he had seen. And what investigators would find on the shore of Lake Zoar, sifting through the snow with a forensic laboratory in a tent, would become the foundation of one of the most extraordinary murder convictions in American legal history. The first time the state of Connecticut would ever secure a conviction for murder without a body.
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For eleven months, Taylor Parker told everyone she was pregnant. She posted gender reveals on social media. She showed off sonograms. She accepted gifts. Her boyfriend believed her. Her friends believed her. So did a young mother in New Boston, Texas named Reagan Simmons-Hancock, who had let Taylor photograph her wedding the year before and had defended her against the doubters. But Taylor Parker had two children already. She had no uterus. She had not been pregnant for a single day. On the 9th of October 2020, with the lie unravelling, Taylor drove to Reagan's home in New Boston with a scalpel in her bag. By the time a state trooper pulled her over on a highway outside De Kalb, Texas, with an umbilical cord visible from her trousers, two lives were over.
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